I got a request for a tour of my bookshelf, so for those who are interested, here is my home library. I always wanted floor-to-ceiling books, so I put together these four bookshelves, inherited or collected one way or another, and I was lucky in that these two bookshelves on top happened to just perfectly […]

So this is the kind of weather they call a wintry mix. Right around the freezing point, we got some snow, some freezing rain, some ice pellets, some sleet, every possible type of precipitation coming down right now, with some strong winds. They’re starting to taper off now. But yeah, this is what the day

It seems like at the heart of a negative mindset is this kind of state of sulking, this idea that I am not happy with this situation. Not in the sense of I’m in a bad situation, therefore I must work to improve the situation. That seems like a reasonable thing. Because sometimes, some people

So today was Black Friday, which I’ve been hearing about from stores and advertisers that this is a big event, it’s almost become like a new holiday, but it still seems very strange to me. The idea of Black Friday is it’s the day after American Thanksgiving, which is the fourth Thursday in November. And

My first-ever comment, from Youtuber Reading Classics, who mentions the idea that many people are masters of suffering. And I like the idea of training and education, the idea that everything we do is our training and our education, and we can look at it that way. It’s putting in the hours, it’s going to

Got a question from listener Valexis on self-censorship. She is an artist with some very dark material, and she’s concerned that it may be taken the wrong way and could actually have a negative, harmful effect on people. But at the same time, it could also have a powerful cathartic effect and be helpful. So

Patience is a wonderful thing. What would we do without the ability to let things happen over time? The lack of patience is wanting to have everything right away, and very few good things happen immediately at the snap of the fingers. In fact, this is one of the easiest ways to fall into the

A response I sometimes get to notions of self-development, changing ourselves, is the idea that, for me, it’s too late. I’m too old. I missed my chance, and now there’s no point in me making all these changes. I’m just too far behind. And it’s very understandable to have this feeling, that we sort of

Time is one of those tricky things, because it doesn’t really exist in a way that we can really grab it. And yet we can almost treat it like it exists. We can we can measure something that we call time, measure it through clocks, and then we can think about having certain numbers of

Well, it’s a sunny winter day here in Toronto, and this is about as bright and sunny as it gets here in the winter, just about noon, full sun. And throughout this winter, this is a time when those living in northern parts of the world are really feeling this kind of winter bleakness. There’s